My private Italy: The Altar of the Fatherland, the white giant of Rome

Ask a Roman for directions in the city centre, and you may get a strange answer. “Go straight on until you reach the typewriter, then turn left.” They mean the colossal white monument above Piazza Venezia. Officially it is the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II. Everyone calls it the Vittoriano or the Altare della Patria, the Altar of the Fatherland.

Romans have given it plenty of nicknames, from torta nuziale, the wedding cake, to dentiera, the false teeth. But the one that stuck is la macchina da scrivere, the typewriter. The long row of white columns looks like a keyboard. The stepped terraces recall the carriage of an old Olivetti. Romans even joke that the best view of the city is from the top of the Vittoriano. It’s the only place in Rome where you can’t see the Vittoriano!

And yet, as I always tell my guests, this is far more than a giant piece of marble. It is the family album of a young nation. And at its heart, two soldiers guard a young man whose name nobody knows, day and night. Let me tell you his story, and the story of the giant that keeps him.

A king, a competition and a hill

On January 9th, 1878, Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of united Italy, died in Rome. Parliament soon decided that the Padre della Patria, the father of the nation, deserved a great monument. It would also honour the whole Risorgimento. Italy was still young, and Rome had been its capital for only seven years. A great monument in the heart of the new capital would show the world that the country was here to stay.

It took two international competitions. The second, in 1882, came with a site no Roman could ignore. It was the northern slope of the Capitoline Hill, the sacred hill of ancient Rome. The winner was Giuseppe Sacconi, an architect not yet thirty. His idea was bold: not a simple statue, but a vast, open marble forum. He drew on the great sanctuaries of the ancient world. It would be a secular temple of the new Italy, in the city of the popes. King Umberto I laid the foundation stone on March 22nd, 1885.

What the typewriter swallowed

Here’s the part that surprises most people on my tours. Before the Vittoriano, this slope was not empty at all. A dense medieval and Renaissance neighbourhood covered it. There were narrow lanes, tower houses and workshops. The cloisters of the great convent of Santa Maria in Aracoeli also stood there, still crowning the hill. Overlooking it all stood Pope Paul III’s tower.

The builders demolished all of it. Families had to move out, and the convent buildings and the papal tower vanished. Even the elegant Palazzetto Venezia, which closed the square, had to go. Workers took it down stone by stone and rebuilt it a few metres away, to open up the view. Today, at the foot of the long staircase that climbs to Aracoeli, one small medieval house survives. It is a lonely witness to the neighbourhood that disappeared. Later, the digs around the monument uncovered something even older. Next to it stood an ancient Roman apartment block, several storeys high.

Fifty years of work, and lunch inside a horse

Building on the Capitoline turned out to be a nightmare. The costs kept rising, the project changed again and again, and Sacconi died in 1905 without seeing it finished. Three other architects, Gaetano Koch, Manfredo Manfredi and Pio Piacentini, carried the work forward.

King Vittorio Emanuele III inaugurated the monument on June 4th, 1911, for the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification. But it was still far from complete. The works went on for another quarter of a century and ended only in 1935. From the first stone to the last, it took fifty years: more than it took to unify Italy itself.

Just before the inauguration, the Vittoriano gave Rome one of its most delightful stories. The bronze equestrian statue of the king was enormous, about twelve metres tall. Before they closed it and lifted it onto its pedestal, the workmen celebrated in style. They sat down to lunch inside the horse’s belly! A photograph of that banquet still exists, and I love it.

A white giant in a golden city

The result is about 135 metres wide and 70 metres high. Along the top runs a long curved colonnade, the “keyboard” of the typewriter. At either end, two bronze chariots celebrate Unity and Liberty. What really divided the Romans, though, was the colour. The marble is dazzling white Botticino from near Brescia. It looks like a stranger in a city of warm travertine and ochre plaster. At the centre of it all is the Altare della Patria itself. The goddess Roma stands in a golden niche, between two flames that never go out. At the base, two fountains represent the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian, the two seas that embrace Italy. Above the colonnade, sixteen statues stand for the regions of the country. Inside, the monument also houses the Museum of the Risorgimento, with flags, uniforms and letters from the years of unification.

The fourth of November

To understand who sleeps beneath the goddess Roma, we have to go back to the First World War. Italy entered it in 1915. For three and a half years it fought a brutal war along its north-eastern border. The front ran through the Alps, the Asiago plateau, the Piave river and the stony Carso. More than 600,000 Italian soldiers never came home. Almost every town and village in Italy still has a war memorial with the names of its fallen. Many of those names belong to boys of eighteen or nineteen. In November 1918, after the battle of Vittorio Veneto, Austria-Hungary signed the armistice at Villa Giusti, near Padua. The guns fell silent at 3 pm on November 4th.

That date became sacred in Italy. It was first celebrated as a holiday in 1919, in 1922 it became an official national holiday and for generations schools and offices closed. In 1977, during an economic crisis, the celebration moved to the first Sunday of November. In 2024, a new law brought the Day of National Unity and of the Armed Forces back to 4 November. It remains a working day, though. Every year, on that morning, the President of the Republic climbs the steps of the Vittoriano. He lays a laurel wreath on one particular tomb. And that tomb has a story that still moves me every time I tell it.

The mother who chose for all mothers

After the war, hundreds of thousands of families had no grave to cry over. Their sons had simply vanished in the mud, blown apart by shells or buried where they fell. In 1920 Colonel Giulio Douhet proposed an idea already taking shape in France and Britain. Italy would honour one soldier nobody could identify, so that every family could believe he might be theirs. In August 1921 Parliament approved the law.

A special commission travelled the old front, from the Asiago plateau to the Carso. It recovered eleven bodies, with no name, no rank, no sign of any kind. Eleven identical coffins then travelled to the ancient Basilica of Aquileia, in Friuli. Nobody, not even the officers, knew where each one came from.

Who should choose? Not a general, not a minister, not the king. It should be a mother, standing for all the mothers and widows of Italy who never got their children back. They found her in Maria Bergamas, born in Gradisca d’Isonzo, a small town on the Isonzo river, who lived in Trieste. Before the war, both belonged to Austria.

Maria and the eleven coffins

Her story could not have been more symbolic. Her son Antonio, born in 1891, was an Austro-Hungarian subject. He should have fought in the emperor’s army. Instead, he crossed the lines and enlisted with the Italians under a false name. If the Austrians had captured him, he risked hanging as a traitor. On June 16th, 1916, during the great Austrian offensive of that spring, machine-gun fire hit him at the foot of Monte Cimone, near the Asiago plateau. His comrades buried him in a small war cemetery, but later shelling destroyed it, and nobody ever found his body. So Maria was everything the country wanted to honour at once: she was a mother without a grave to visit, from one of the lands Italy had fought to unite. And her son had chosen Italy at the cost of his life.

On October 28th, 1921, dressed in black, she entered the crowded basilica. The eleven coffins stood in a row, all exactly alike. She walked slowly along them in complete silence. She did not reach the end. In front of the tenth coffin, her strength gave way. She collapsed to the ground, crying out her son’s name. With that gesture, she had made her choice. The soldier inside that coffin would become Il Milite Ignoto, the Unknown Soldier. He would stand for all the young men who died in the war and lie in graves without a name.

The other ten soldiers rest in the small war cemetery behind the basilica. When Maria died in 1953, she asked to lie among them, a mother among her ten sons with no name. And there she still lies.

The longest funeral in Italian history

On October 29th, the coffin left Aquileia on a specially designed railway carriage. The train moved slowly across the country, through Venice, Bologna and Florence. All along the line, people came out to meet it. Peasants knelt in the fields, and church bells rang even in villages where it did not stop. Mothers and veterans waited for hours at tiny stations, throwing flowers onto the tracks. For four days, a whole country held its breath.

The train reached Rome on November 2nd and the coffin rested in the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli. On the morning of November 4th, 1921, the third anniversary of the victory, a gun carriage carried it to the Vittoriano. Huge crowds lined the streets. Then, the soldiers laid it in the tomb beneath the goddess Roma. The inscription is just two Latin words: Ignoto Militi, “to the unknown soldier”. From that day on, the monument to a king became something else, much closer to every Italian family. It became the Altar of the Fatherland.

Romans will probably keep calling it the typewriter and joking about the view. But whatever they say about its looks, for Italians the Altar of the Fatherland goes far beyond architecture. It is one of the few places where the whole country, north and south, recognises itself. Every November 4th and June 2nd, the President of the Republic lays a wreath and the national anthem plays. On those days, this is where Italy remembers it is one nation. And it is a place of respect: it honours a young Italian with no name. Through him, I like to think it honours all the men and women who gave their lives for their country in war, anytime and anywhere.

Ciao da Marcello

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